Episode Description:
In this episode we explore why the customer experience (CX) is quickly becoming the focal point for many companies. Also discussed is how you can easily leverage the customer experience to greatly boost your brand loyalty. In the coming years CX will be center focal point for all business decisions – so be prepared now, get a jumpstart on the competition, and create an environment that puts your customers first.
Action you can take right now:
The goal of this podcast is to provide marketing and service insights, but also to provide actionable items that can occur right away without much thought. This episode explores the customer experience – here are a few things you can do right now to take action!
- Make a list of things that are part of your customer’s experience that ADD value to the transaction (think Disney).
- Take the easiest thing in the list and try implementing it over the next 30-days.
- Each month take another thing from the list try implementing it.
After-Show Thoughts:
It’s all about adding value! How can you add value through the customer experience? In the episode Disney is the example. Be it Disney World or Disneyland, by creating an incredible experience for customers it allows them to charge exorbitant fees for merchandise, food, and drinks.
This is harder then it sounds, and while many parts of the experience seem obvious, Disney is a great example of why it’s not always so obvious. Plenty of companies with very smart people try to replicate the experience and charge the premium of a Disney or Apple style company. Even a jewelry store trying to match the perceived value of Tiffany’s struggles – but the best start is to simply start! Start thinking about it, start watching, start listening, really start focusing on each customer touch-point and think “How can I improve this experience?”
Transcript from Episode 10 of the Marketing and Service with Justin Varuzzo podcast:
What is customer experience? What does it mean for your business and why is it becoming the most important thing now? And moving forward that, and more coming up on the marketing and service.com
Hey, Justin Varuzzo here from marketing and service.com podcast. Today. I want to talk about customer experience. Sometimes we see this abbreviated as CX it’s a term that’s become very popular in the last five years, but yet it’s a term that a lot of small business still doesn’t quite understand or have a full grasp on just yet. And that’s okay because really most big businesses also don’t have a grasp on this just yet. They’re just starting to get a handle on it, but this is a place where you can be highly competitive and nimble.
When you compare yourself against large corporations with bureaucracies that find it extremely difficult to make change and to make change quickly. So let’s start with what is customer experience? What is the customer experience? There are endless definitions to customer experience when you look them up online. But for me personally, I define it as how customers perceive each and every engagement with your business, including the peripheral perceptions of every conceivable category of interaction you could possibly imagine.
What does this mean? Were they treated well? Did they get the product? Was the product good quality? Does the product hold up is the service, what it was described as was the support sufficient when they had a problem. What’s the return policy? What’s the exchange policy was the e-commerce checkout process easy or was it difficult? What about product or service usability? Was it easy to use if it was easy to use? Was it easy to find instructions? Were the directions clear or were they difficult to understand this goes on and on and on. And it’s the culmination of all of these things that really create the customer experience. And I think one of the reasons it’s become so important is because it’s easy to overlook certain aspects.
If you’re in marketing, you’re always looking at your marketing metrics, right? You create this amazing ad campaign, but metrics are through the roof. You’ve been a great success. You high five and you move on to the next day. If you’re in product development, you release a new product. The sales does great. You’re happy. And you’re having a party at the office the next day. But at some point, everyone has to step back and look at all of these other peripheral things that happen.
I’ll give you a very small example. I was once at a retail store. That was absolutely beautiful. The store was amazing. The staff was perfect. They were efficient. They were knowledgeable about the products in the store. Everything was organized really well. The checkout process was super easy. Everyone was so friendly and it was really like a perfect experience. And one thing that blew me away about it is it’s something that’s actually really hard to achieve.
There’s so variables when you’re running a business and to be able to do everything right, is pretty rare. The one thing though was the store was just disgusting , dirty wise. And it wasn’t like someone forgot to clean that day or dust. I mean, these were like windows that hadn’t been cleaned in years and dust that had accumulated for years on certain products , which aside from aging, the product, because you can see that no one’s touched that particular thing for several years. It just, it just wasn’t welcoming. And here you have the customer experience.
They did everything right, but I was just a little skeeved out by how dirty this store was. Now I get it. It’s easy to miss things, especially when you are in a building or a store or an office when you’re in a place, even your own home, when you’re there every single day. It’s so easy to miss things that look so obvious when you walk into someplace else, if you walk into a restaurant, the first thing I always tend to do is look up at the air vents. And usually they are just absolutely disgusting with dirt and dust, all clinging to the edges of the ven , black streaks, all over the ceiling, around the air vent. It’s just something that most people don’t clean. And while I accept that, it always kind of skeeves me out a little bit. And I wonder if that stuff’s going to be blowing in my food.
Now, as I say, this, I’m in my little recording studio here and I can look up in the corner and you know what? I see a cobweb never really paid attention to it. And maybe if someone else was sitting here, they’d might look up and say, God, why does he clean that cobweb up there in the corner? So I get it. These are easy things to miss, but this is why customer experience is becoming so important.
So let’s start by looking at some numbers and some data to support why we’re even having this discussion. I’m going to quote a few things. But one that really stood out for me is HubSpot, which I’ve mentioned before. I’m in no way affiliated with them, but they do offer a , an incredible value for free. Uh, they’re paid tier is quite expensive, but it’s unbelievable what you get as a CRM solution for a service that is completely free each year, they put out a report which is the state of customer service and their state of customer service. 2020 report had some interesting numbers to quote one thing from the report. Customers today have higher expectations than ever before. In this year survey 93% of service teams agreed with that statement.
What that means is that service teams being, these are companies that use HubSpot to handle service issues are saying that yes, customers today expect more from us than they’ve ever expected before. They want their answers faster. They want the solutions and the resolutions faster, and they want everything to be more efficient. The other thing that’s interesting about this is also shows that year over year, this is getting even more important. This year’s data showed that the trend increased because the service teams think the customers are even smarter and have higher expectations than they did last year. So this is not something that’s crept up slowly over 10 years. This is something that’s dramatically year after year now, sadly, they also found that 31% of these service teams thinks that the company that they’re working for considers customer service to be an expense and not an opportunity for growth. And this really stood out to me because quite frankly, this entire podcast is about making sure the customer service is a marketing expense and it is an opportunity for growth. It is an expense. Yeah, sure. But it’s a marketing expense.
It’s not a service expense. It’s not a expense that does not have revenue that can generate to compensate for it. You can view customer service as an income generating portion of the business if the service is done, right? So there is a huge opportunity for growth. And it’s sad to think that 31% of teams don’t see this speaking of customer service, Microsoft says that 90% of Americans use customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company. 90% of Americans think about this use customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company that’s a pretty astounding and staggering figure.
And 58% of American consumers will switch companies because of poor customer service. Think about it 58%. That means that more than half the customers that go to somewhere else that go to your competitor or go elsewhere to make a purchase is because of poor customer service. Now that could be one interaction that is poor. That could be one poor service interaction. And this consumer is on. I don’t have time for this. I’m moving on to the next company. Now here’s something interesting too, that caught my attention because I’ve also mentioned this many times in the last few episodes of the podcast about how you can take a negative experience for a customer and turn it into a very positive experience. And it’s even more impactful when there was a problem in the first place, because now the person has had the opportunity to experience what good customer service is.
This statistic is if the company’s customer service is excellent, 78% of consumers will do business with a company again, after a mistake. And this is why we always talk about building trust. This is about a trust building exercise. This is about building long-term trustworthy relationships. We all understand that people make mistakes. And when you trust someone and they make a mistake and they admit it and they own it and they make it right, it’s usually not a big deal. We get over it. We forgive and we forget there’s another percentage that 78%. And that’s the percentage of customers that have backed out of a purchase due to poor customer experience. T
his is according to glance, that’s right. Eight and 10 people backed out of a purchase decision because of poor customer experience, poor customer experience. This is before they’ve even purchased the product. This is why customer experience is so important. Maybe it was a frustrating process trying to check out on an e-commerce site. Maybe they were looking for more information to validate the purchase. And there was poor sales staff that couldn’t articulate the features or the benefits of the product or service being sold. I mean, there’s so many reasons this happens, but 78% of customers have backed out of a purchase because of a poor customer experience. This is why customer experience is so important. And this is why the corporations, the fortune five hundreds, the big startups and the well-funded businesses, they are laser focused on creating a better customer experience.
Super office CRM is a another company that does reports. They asked 1,920 business professionals to share their number one priority for the next five years. Surprisingly, what came in first customer experience that beat out product and pricing. This goes to show that businesses are beginning to recognize that the customer experience is more important than having necessarily the best product or the best price. And we’ve talked about this on the podcast before you need to deliver an incredible value for what you offer, but that does not necessarily mean it has to be the least expensive. It could be the most expensive, but it still delivers a value that’s greater than the price of the product or service.
But yes, out of nearly 2000 business professionals, the number one focus for the next five years is creating a good customer experience. And when we talk about value, if you want a good example of this, just look at Disney Disney world Disney land. If you’ve been to either one universal , uh, some of the big theme parks, of course, these places are the most expensive place I have ever been. And I love to travel. And I like to go to nice restaurants and I don’t mind spending good money on a good meal, but I was shocked. And my jaw was dropped to see how much money was leaving people’s pockets. As I strolled around Disney, Disney is the most expensive place on earth, but for the families and the children, having such an incredible time and seeing their favorite characters and having the most incredible experiences, suddenly $14 for a beer doesn’t sound so bad anymore because after all, you’re having a good experience, we can’t let money get in the way of having that good experience.
You know, one of the other things we’ve talked about is bad reviews. Esteban Kolsky who is a customer experience. Professional is quoted by saying that only one in 26 customers complain meaning that of 26 customers that have a horrible experience. Only one of them will actually go as far as to leave a bad review on the internet. And this is the most terrifying thing, because now you have 25 customers who’ve bailed and you don’t even know why, and you never will know why.
And I actually, as always have a story to go with this for many years, I would have to rent trucks, seasonally. These were the small box trucks, bed always have a price on the side of them. That is never actually the price you could ever pay in any circumstance, but nonetheless, these trucks were needed for business and they would be rented on a regular basis. The prices were certainly reasonable, although they weren’t what ever was stated on the side of the truck, but the prices were reasonable and the trucks were functional. They weren’t that bad, but they seem to just get worse and worse year after year, some of these trucks had 80, 90, a hundred thousand miles on them. Some had broken pieces, air conditioning, that didn’t work. They were loud. They rattled, they weren’t always comfortable. Sometimes the stereo barely functioned, but this is a box truck. I’m not expecting a luxury sedan. I continued using this company year after year out of sheer convenience, they were located close to where I was and I never had an issue getting a truck.
This , the service experience was actually quite efficient and quite well. My trucks were always ready on time. I never had an issue when returning a vehicle. It was just a pretty flawless process. My only complaint would be the quality of the trucks. It wasn’t until a very busy back to school, college weekend, where I was unable to get a truck for the first time, there was just nowhere to be found, not even at three or four of the places that were further away from me. This brand just did not have anything available. They were all being used, which led me to the competition where the pricing was similar. But the pickup location was just a little bit further away, maybe another five minutes than what I was used to, not a big deal. And lo and behold, they did have a truck available. The process was similar in securing the vehicle and the pricing was about the same, but wow, this felt like a luxury sedan compared to the trucks I’ve been renting for the last five years.
These trucks all had between 1000 and 15,000 miles on them. They all seem to brand new. They had all the basic fundamental features you’d expect like a radio power windows. They even had the auxiliary input . So I could plug in an iPod. This was life-changing . This was something really special. And from that moment on, I never rented a truck from the other company. Again. Now I wasn’t about to go and leave a bad review on the internet. They had served me well for years, but honestly I was the 25th , five out of 26 people who just move on and never give that company another chance. They’ll never know why I never came back. So something to keep in mind is that for every bad review you could possibly get on the internet. There’s probably another 25 people who feel exactly the same way and who have just never expressed themselves. A
gain. This is why the entire customer experience is so important and becoming such a focus for so many businesses. Another demand in this world of customer experience development is having multi-channel service. Or sometimes you’ll hear this referred to as omni-channel service. This is the ability to serve your customer on a plethora of platforms, right? So you could provide support on Facebook. You provide support on Twitter, you do it through your website. You can do it over the, they can send an email, they can hit you up on Instagram. They can find you on it . Forum. This is you being everywhere that your customers are ready to serve them. If there is a problem, or if they want to purchase something. And for each one of these functions, the consumer is expecting that not only is it going to work on every social media platform, but they’re also expecting that you’re going to have a great mobile experience with your service and that all of these things will be accessible through mobile. So I think by covering all of these things, you’re starting to get the idea of what customer experience is and why customer experience is so important. And I’m going to jump back to pricing versus creating value.
And I know I’ve discussed it in previous episodes, but I want to reiterate it. And I want to bring it together with customer experience. When you are pricing your product or service, you have to factor in the customer experience and the value that that customer experience creates. And you have to really understand what the importance of that value really is to your customer. Now, a great example here would be, if you , uh , have a phone that’s about to die and you forgot your charger, and now you’re at a gas station and you see there’s one of those $3 chargers available at the counter. You’re going to buy that with the expectation that is probably not going to charge your phone more than once. You just hope that it’s going to charge at one time. So you can get through the day. Your expectation is incredibly low. And when after a few weeks that charger stops working, you’re not going to try to seek out the manufacturer and then leave bad reviews on the internet for them because your expectations were incredibly low in the first place. And it was a really low purchase decision in the fact that it’s only a few dollars and you were in a desperate situation, but let’s be honest, very few things in life that we’re spending money on fall into that category.
So how can you take what you’re selling and create a better value and just think about that. How can you take what you offer, whether it’s a product or a service and create additional value from it because creating value lies entirely in the customer experience. The MC ultra at Disney, that was $14 is the exact same can of MC ultra that I would find at a local bar for four or $5, but I was willing to spend the $14 because it was creating a value and it was improving the customer experience. Here I am. I’m in the greatest place on earth. It’s Disney world. I’ve already been primed to spend a lot of money. You go into it knowing that this is going to be expensive. You know, the food’s going to be expensive. The drinks are going to be expensive. There’s going to be a bunch of ad-ons. Kids are going to want all sorts of toys and gadgets. I don’t think anyone is stumbling into a Disney thinking. It’s a Walmart , but think about what Disney has to do and how they have to elevate what they offer to create that environment, that environment doesn’t just come out of thin air. They are making it a point for you and your family to have the most incredible experience of your life and experience that you simply get anywhere else. And this is how they are able to create such great value while completely disregarding price.
When it comes to price efficiency. Now, Disney is not alone. We’ve been to a lot of experiences where there are some outrageous price tags attached to things, but they’re not always a positive experience. Most people aren’t thrilled to pay $14 for a hot dog and $12 for a beer at a baseball game, because while the game is fun and you’re usually going to have a good time, you pay those prices while suffering in silence. It’s certainly not the same experience that’s created in an environment like a Disney world, but sometimes you’re left with no options. So to jump back to the beginning, what is customer experience? It’s everything. It’s literally everything. It’s every interaction customers have with you. And it should be everything for your business.
When you do anything, you should think, how is this going to affect the customer experience? So the one thing I’m going to ask you to do is start by mapping out your customer journey. A lot of people don’t do this or take the time to do it, but I , I think it’s a, it’s a good starting point to really evaluate how you create a customer experience. So think about how do you get a customer. They seeing an ad. Is it a referral from a friend? Is it a social post? Is it drive by traffic? What draws someone in? Because that’s the first step, right? That’s the first engagement someone would have with your business.
Now, once they’re aware of your business and you’ve gotten past this awareness phase, what’s the next step? Are they coming into your store? Are they visiting your website? Are they checking you out on Facebook or Instagram? Are they looking up reviews about your product or service? What’s the next step think about, and this is different for every business. So I can’t answer it, but you have to think about that and figure out what’s the next step that a customer would likely take, because this is essentially them making a pre-purchase decision. Deciding, do I even want to go here? Do I want to set foot in this place? And if they do the next step is going to be actually making the purchase. What’s the purchase process. Is it easy? Is it simple? Is it straightforward ? Is it long? Is it hard as a complicated, do they need to have an attorney with them to get through the process and maybe they do, and maybe that’s appropriate depending on what you’re selling, but you need to know what that is. And then of course, there’s the follow-up . If there’s a problem, if there’s questions, what is the follow-up routine and what is the, what is the life cycle of this customer? Do they come back in again? Or is it a one and done type deal? And again, this varies business to business, so there’s no right answer, but it’s important that you look at every one of these touch points that a customer has.
These are direct touch points and determine are these delivering the most amount of value they can possibly deliver? And if they can, that’s absolutely fantastic. But if they don’t or you think there’s places to improve it, this is a good starting point because I’ve already said that customer experience is literally everything in your business. And you already know you’re overwhelmed and running a business is doing the job of a thousand people. So just saying it’s, everything is pretty vague. So I’m trying to give you a specific action point that you can just jump in right now. So just start with that customer journey for the average customer, how do they learn about you? What do they do after they learn about you? How do they engage with your product or service? How do they purchase it? What do they do follow up after the fact and how do you bring them back into that cycle again, if appropriate and after you make that little map, it probably shouldn’t be more than five, six or seven things on this map. Then start to think about how that is perceived by each customer. Is each step clear? Is it easy to follow or does it bounce back and forth? Is there a lot of follow-up ? Is there a little bit of follow-up ? Is there ways to follow up more efficiently? Are there common questions you’re always asked that maybe just need to be on the front page of a website? Is there anything you can do preemptively to help the customer along? So just think about these things and start to think about customer experience from beginning to end, because I’m telling you it is going to be the most important thing that comes out of the next 10 years. This decade is going to completely revolutionize customer experience, and it’s going to completely revolutionize the way people shop and the way they behave and the expectations that they have when they’re spending money.
I want to thank you so much for listening. If you’ve enjoyed this show, please subscribe. Please follow. Please leave a review, because that means we talk about reviews all the time. I be crazy for me not to solicit one right now, please take a moment, leave a written review, especially on iTunes. That means so much to me. And of course, visit the website for all the follow-up notes. I do follow up with each episode with some afterthoughts and a list of action items. So if you listened to an episode and you’re not quite sure, well, what can I do right now? Just jump over to the website and look at that episode. And I will have a list for you already prepared of things for you to do right now. That’s over@marketingandservice.com, marketing and service.com. If you have any questions for me directly, shoot me an email. I look forward from hearing to you, and I hope to see you over on the Facebook group, the marketing and service.com Facebook group. Check it out. Thank you so much for listening. We’ll see you next week.